Ch. 01 (A COOKIE for PUPPY GIRL) – An Oregonian on Loan to California^[1]

Recall that I had just been hired to start work as a Data Specialist at Triton Biosciences, a small, start-up biotech company in the San Francisco Bay Area in the Spring of 1986 and I was tasked with packing up my belongings in Portland (OR) and making the long drive south where I was planning to stay at my girlfriend’s place that she shared with her two friends near downtown San Francisco. They had just rented a ‘flat’ and were in the process of moving in, although their third roommate would not arrive for a couple of months so I happily agreed to rent that room until I got settled in to my own apartment. My girlfriend also needed more of her belongings brought down from Oregon so we agreed to split the rental cost of a U-Haul trailer and I would transport our stuff down together in one trip.

My biggest concern was that I had recently sold my car and had secured a ‘tired and beat-up’ 1962 ¾ ton Ford pick-up in the transaction until I could afford to buy a newer car. In fact, my friend Lance loaned me the money and after visiting the worst car lots in the greater Portland area, we were getting frustrated that no one would sell us a car for less than $800 until some guy drove by and offered to sell us his truck for the $280 cash we had on-hand. To this day, I am still amazed that the title cleared as we were convinced that it was probably stolen.  In any case, the truck was fine for driving around town, but I wasn’t sure how it would perform on a 700-mile freeway trip, and I certainly didn’t know how I would maneuver such a ‘beastly’ truck through the narrow streets of SF, not to mention finding a place to park it on those steep and ‘tangled’ roads. I figured I would deal with that problem when I arrived so, without giving it much more thought, I hitched up a fully-loaded 6×12-foot trailer, and made the 200-mile trip south to my parents’ home in Roseburg to spend the night. Dad had agreed to drive down to California with me for support so I knew we would have a great visit along the way. We were on the road very early on that Friday morning as the next several hours would take us over a series of mountains (i.e., The Siskiyou’s) near the Oregon – California border, and it soon became clear that we had a problem or as we refer to them as,‘gotchas!’. The truck started over-heating and then the radiator sprang a leak so we had to stop every thirty minutes to cool it off and refill it with water. In addition, we probably had been too optimistic in expecting that old truck to tow the larger trailer we had needed to accommodate all of our ‘junk’, so the extra weight caused the brakes to overheat on the steep mountain freeway near the border forcing me to downshift into lower gears to help slow our momentum as we descended. That seemed like a better idea than losing control and careening off a cliff but eventually, we totally‘burned-out’ first gear in the process, so we had to be really careful not to lose our momentum as we ascended or the truck would stall on the side of the road with no way to restart without the lower gear.

Eventually, after what seemed like an eternity, we made it through the Mt. Shasta Wilderness area in northern California, which marked the end of the mountains, and now we just needed to keep the truck from overheating in the 100-degree Sacramento Valley heat. By the way, we had no air-conditioning, but at that point we were feeling blessed just to be advancing toward our destination. Finally, we reached the east side of the Bay Area, and were approaching the Bay Bridge that took us directly into SF, but, of course, we arrived at the peak of rush-hour traffic and it became evident that I had not balanced the load when I packed the trailer so it was very difficult keeping the heavy trailer from swaying into other lanes. We did arrive, but Dad looked at me and remarked,“That was worse than hitting the beaches at Normandy, son!”,and although I knew he was joking, it was terrifying, maybe even more so than my adventures skydiving years earlier.

Rick and his wife, Laura were waiting at my girlfriend’s place when we arrived, so we quickly unpacked the trailer, got it parked for the evening, had dinner and then crashed for the night, happy to be alive. The next morning, we barely got the truck started in order to return the U-Hail trailer a few miles away, and what a relief it was to be rid of that albatross. However, when the attendant was helping us unhook the trailer, I still recall his snarky comment about my truck, “I’m surprised you made it down from Oregon in this piece of junk, I doubt it is worth fifty bucks”. Without even hesitating or taking into consideration that it was MY truck, Dad looked back at that attendant and said,“Well, it is your lucky day because we’ll sell it to you for forty bucks right here and now”. Ten minutes later, we walked out of the U-Haul Service Center with $40, which was enough cash for each of us to get a beer, a burger and share a cab ride back home. To celebrate, Rick took all of us to our first Major League Baseball game where we watched the home team Oakland A’s, with their famous‘Bash Brothers’duo of Mark McGuire and Jose Canseco beat the New York Yankees 4-3 before a sold-out stadium.

In reflection, as stressful as my move down to the Bay Area was, it still was a very EXCITING time in my life. I was really feeling the energy of starting a new job that I knew would allow me to utilize my education and maturity to launch my career in the exploding biotech field. I was also excited to be reunited with my girlfriend, and even though we actually had only spent a few weeks together before she moved to SF a couple of months earlier, it would be great to get further acquainted. So, all that was left to do on that Sunday was drive Dad to the airport for his trip back to Oregon and get ready to start my new job in the morning.

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^[1]Disclaimer: This excerpt and corresponding writing sample display some color but the actual book is in black and white.

Ch. 17 (A TURD in THE PICKLE JAR) – Wild Girl of the Pampas^[1]

One summer during college, I was working long hours at a local sawmill to earn money for school, but the work was so boring, that in order to help make the time pass by more quickly, I would jot down some of my favorite poetry on index cards, especially the longer ballads, and practice memorizing them at work. In fact, at that time, and still, to this day, two of my favorite poems were written by Robert Service, a Scottish poet who wrote outlandish ballads (i.e., narrative poetry) about the Klondike gold rush when gold was found in northern Canada’s Yukon Territory in 1896. Below is the first verse from his ballad, ‘The Shooting of Dan McGrew’(Service, 1911) telling a story of two old miners fighting it out for the love of a scandalous woman they both had loved at one time:

His second ballad (i.e., first verse below), ‘The Cremation of Sam McGee’ (Service, 1911), was, “A gold rush yarn from a mining man about a fellow who cremated his pal” who died while panning for gold in the Yukon Territory.

There are strange things done in the midnight sun
                  By the men who moil for gold;
The arctic trails have their secret tales
                  That would make your blood run cold;
The Northern Lights have seen queer sights,
                  But the queerest they ever did see
Was that night on the marge of Lake Lebarge
                  I cremated Sam McGee.

I had been introduced to both of these poems by my dad years earlier when he used to share stories with my little sister, Pamela, before tucking her in at bedtime. The tradition started simply enough when Dad would read stories to her, but she soon grew tired of them, and Mom always loved telling the story of five-year old Pamela looking at him and saying, “Quite frankly Dad, you frequently bore me”. As a result, he created a character to emulate Pamela, who he named ‘Pamelita, Wild Girl of the Pampas’. Incidentally, ‘Pamelita’  is a Spanish variation of the name Pamela, and means ‘all sweetness’ or ‘sweet as honey’.

Recall that Dad was an English Literature instructor and he was an incredibly voracious reader throughout his life, so he was able to draw on stories he had read as well as his own personal experiences, especially from his time in Europe during World War II. To clarify, there are various legends about a young girl who was separated from her parents and lived for years by herself in ‘The Pampas’ which refers to, “A vast, fertile plain, primarily located in Argentina, Uruguay and Brazil, and stretches from the Atlantic Ocean to the foothills of the Andes mountains” (The South America Specialists, 2025). The story was made famous when a similarly young French girl, possibly Marie-Angelique Memmie Le Blanc, who lived for ten years in the wilderness after escaping the plague in 1722 and later captured in 1731 (Marie-Angelique Memmie Le Blanc, 2025). Henceforth, the ‘Wild Girl of the Pampas’ title came to reference, in some literary circles, ‘young independent girls who lived on their own and travelled the world’, which Dad cleverly used to create stories of Pamela’s so-called adventures all around the world. His stories, which continued nightly for a couple of years were so fascinating that I joined the bedside vigils when I could, and when the character made her way to Alaska and The Canadian Yukon Territory for the Klondike Gold Rush, we were introduced to Robert Service. In fact, to this day, when I hear either of those two poems, I think of Dad filling our imagination with fantastic stories of ‘Pamelita, Wild Girl of the Pampas’.

Of special note, when Robert Service arrived in the town of Whitehorse, a small frontier town in the Yukon Territory that served as a campground for prospectors on their way to join the Klondike Gold Rush, he began reciting poetry in taverns and at concerts for entertainment (“Robert W. Service”, 2025). This, in turn, inspired me to master both of these ballads while laboring at the sawmill over the next two months before leaving for Arizona.

In reflection, and in all honesty, I committed both lengthy poems to memory in less than a week and have had the pleasure of reciting each countless times, whether it is sitting around a campfire with others or driving alone on a long road trip and I still feel the EXCITEMENT that Service injected into these truly great works of poetry. In fact, when my three children were very young, I would recite them as bedtime stories so often that each of the children could blurt out the words with a little prompting. For example, after Ravae got them settled into bed, it became a nightly ritual that the lights wouldn’t be turned off until I entered the room and asked them if they wanted a story, offering up tales of princesses or pirates? Predictably, they would always insist on one or the other of these two ballads, and if I would start off by reciting from The Cremation of Sam McGee, ‘There are strange things done’, they would shout out, ‘In the midnight sun’ and this would continue through most of the first few verses. 

In conclusion, one of the items on my bucket list is to visit the Malemute Saloon (i.e., the saloon in The Shooting of Dan McGrew), located just outside Fairbanks, Alaska for a midnight poetry reading of these two ballads, but rumor has it that it ended several years ago due to COVID. I can only hope the tradition will be resurrected before I pass and that I will be healthy enough to make that journey.

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“Marie-Angelique Memmie Le Blanc” (2025, April 7). In Wikipedia. Retrieved from Marie-Angelique Memmie Le Blanc [URL].

Service, R.W. (1911). “The Cremation of Sam McGee” [Poem]. The Spell of the Yukon and Other Verses. New York: Barse & Hopkins Publishing.

Service, R.W. (1911). “The Shooting of Dan McGrew” [Poem]. The Spell of the Yukon and Other Verses. New York: Barse & Hopkins Publishing.

The South America Specialists (2025). Las Pampas [Website]. Las Pampas [URL].

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^[1]Disclaimer: This excerpt and corresponding writing sample display some color but the actual book is in black and white.